West's craft fled like a silvery shadow between the towering mountain
peaks shielding the only valley on Pluto that had ever known the tread
of Man.
Coasting in on silent motors in the shadow of the planet, he had eluded
the patrol. Beyond the mountains he had thrown in the motors, had
braked the plunging ship almost to a crawl, taking the chance the flare
of the rockets might be seen by any of the patrol far out in space.
And now, speed reduced, dropping in a long slant toward the
glass-smooth landing field, he huddled over the controls, keyed to
a free-fall landing, always dangerous at best. But it would be as
dangerous, he sensed, to advertise his coming with another rocket
blast. The field was long and smooth. If he hit it right and not too
far out, there would be plenty of room.
The almost nonexistent atmosphere was a point in favor. There were no
eddies, no currents of air to deflect the ship, send it into a spin or
a dangerous wobble.
Off to the right he caught a flash of light and his mind clicked the
split-second answer that it must be the laboratory.
Then the ship was down, pancaking, hissing along the landing strip,
friction gripping the hull. It stopped just short of a jumbled pile
of rock and West let out his breath, felt his heart take up the beat
again. A few feet more....
Locking the controls, he hung the key around his neck, pulled down the
visor of his space gear and let himself out of the ship.
Across the field glowed the lights of the laboratory. He had not been
mistaken, then. He had seen the lights ... and men were here. Or could
he be mistaken? Those lights would have continued to function even
without attention. The fact that they were shining in the building was
no reason to conclude that men also were there.
At the far end of the field loomed a massive structure and West knew
that it was the shops of the Alpha Centauri expedition, where men
had labored for two years to make the Henderson space drive work.
Somewhere, he knew, in the shadow of the star-lighted shops, was the
ship itself, the _Alpha Centauri_, left behind when the crew had given
up in despair and gone back to Earth. A ship designed to fly out to the
stars, to quit the Solar System and go into the void, spanning light
years as easily as an ordinary ship went from Earth to Mars.
It hadn't gone, of course, but that didn't matter.
"A symbol," West said to himself.
That was what it was ... a symbol and a dream.
And something, too, now that he was here, now that he could admit it,
that had lain in the back of his mind all the way from Earth.
West shucked his belt around so that the pistol hung handy to his fist.
If men were here ... or worse, if that message hadn't been a phony, he
might need the pistol. Although it was unlikely that the sort of thing
that he then would face would be vulnerable to a pistol.
Shivering, he remembered that terse, secret report reposing in the
confidential archives back on Earth ... the transcription of the tense,
rasping voice that had come over the radio from Pluto, a voice that
told of dreadful things, of dying men and something that was loose. A
voice that had screamed a warning, then had gurgled and died out.
It was after that that the ban had been put on the planet and the space
patrol sent out to quarantine the place.
Mystery from the first, he thought ... beginning and the end. First
because the commission was seeking a hormone to effect controlled
mutations in the human race. And the race would resent such a thing, of
course, so it had to be a mystery.
The human race, West thought bitterly, resents anything that deviates
from the norm. It used to stone the leper from the towns and it
smothered its madmen in deep featherbeds and it stares at a crippled
thing and its pity is a burning insult. And its fear ... oh, yes, its
fear!
Slowly, carefully, West made his way across the landing strip. The
surface was smooth, so smooth that his space boots had little grip upon
it.
On the rocky height above the field stood the laboratory, but West
turned back and stared out into space, as if he might be taking final
leave of someone that he knew.
Earth, he said. Earth, can you hear me now?
You need no longer fear me and you need not worry, for I shall not come
back.
But the day will come when there are others like me. And there may be
even now.
For you can't tell a mutant by the way he combs his hair, nor the way
he walks or talks. He sprouts no horns and he grows no tail and there's
no mark upon his forehead.
But when you spot one, you must watch him carefully. You must spy
against him and set double-checks about him. And you must find a place
to put him where you'll be safe from anything he does ... but you must
not let him know. You must try him and sentence him and send him into
exile without his ever knowing it.
Like, said West, you tried to do with me.
But, said West, talking to the Earth, I didn't like your exile, so I
chose one of my own. Because I knew, you see. I knew when you began to
watch me and about the double-checks and the conferences and the plan
of action and there were times when I could hardly keep from laughing
in your face.
* * * * *
He stood for a long moment, staring into space, out where the Earth
swam somewhere in darkness around the star-like Sun.
Bitter? he asked himself. And answered: No, not bitter. Not exactly
bitter.
For you must understand, he said, still talking to the Earth, that a
man is human first and mutant after that. He is not a monster simply
because he is a mutant ... he is just a little different. He is human
in every way that you are human and it may be that he is human in more
ways than you are. For the human race as it stands today is the history
of long mutancy ... of men who were a little different, who thought a
little clearer, who felt a deeper compassion, who held an attribute
that was more human than the rest of their fellow men. And they passed
that clearer thinking and that deeper compassion on to sons and
daughters and the sons and daughters passed it on to some--not all--but
some of their sons and daughters. Thus the race grew up from savagery,
thus the human concept grew.
Perhaps, he thought, my father was a mutant, a mutant that no one
suspected. Or it may have been my mother. And neither of them would
have been suspected. For my father was a farmer and if his mutancy had
made the crops grow a little better through his better understanding
of the soil or through a deeper feeling for the art of growing things,
who would there be to know that he was a mutant? He would simply have
been a better farmer than his neighbors. And if at night, when he read
the well-worn books that stood on the shelf in the dining room, he
understood those books and the things they meant to say better than
most other men, who was there to know?
But I, he said, I was noticed. That is the crime of mutancy, to be
noticed. Like the Spartan boy whose crime of stealing a fox was no
crime at all, but whose cries when the fox ripped out his guts were a
crime indeed.
I rose too fast, he thought. I cut through too much red tape. I
understood too well. And in governmental office you can not rise too
fast nor cut red tape nor understand too well. You must be as mediocre
as your fellow office-holders. You cannot point to a blueprint of a
rocket motor and say, "There is the trouble," when men who are better
trained than you cannot see the trouble. And you cannot devise a system
of production that will turn out two rocket motors for the price of
one in half the time. For that is not only being too efficient; it's
downright blasphemy.
But most of all you cannot stand up in open meeting of government
policy makers and point out that mutancy is no crime in itself ... that
it only is a crime when it is wrongly used. Nor say that the world
would be better off if it used its mutants instead of being frightened
of them.
Of course, if one knew one was a mutant, one would never say a thing
like that. And a mutant, knowing himself a mutant, never would point
out a thing that was wrong with a rocket engine. For a mutant has to
keep his mouth shut, has to act the mediocre man and arrive at the ends
he wishes by complex indirection.
If I had only known, thought West. If I had only known in time. I could
have fooled them, as I hope many others even now are fooling them.
But now he knew it was too late, too late to turn back to the life that
he had rejected, to go back and accept the dead-end trap that had been
fashioned for him ... a trap that would catch and hold him, where he
would be safe. And where the human race would be safe from him.
West turned around and found the path that led up the rocky decline
toward the laboratory.
A hulking figure stepped out of the shadows and challenged him.
"Where do you think you're going?"
West halted. "Just got in," he said. "Looking for a friend of mine. By
the name of Nevin."
Inside the pocket of his suit, he felt Annabelle stirring restlessly.
Probably she was getting cold.
"Nevin?" asked the man, a note of alarm chilling his voice. "What do
you want of Nevin?"
"He's got a painting," West declared.
The man's voice turned silky and dangerous. "How much do you know about
Nevin and his painting?"
"Not much," said West. "That's why I'm here. Wanted to talk with him
about it."
Annabelle turned a somersault inside West's zippered pocket. The man's
eyes caught the movement.
"What you got in there?" he demanded, suspiciously.
"Annabelle," said West. "She's--well, she's something like a skinned
rat, partly, with a face that's almost human, except it's practically
all mouth."
"You don't say. Where did you get her?"
"Found her," West told him.
Laughter gurgled in the man's throat. "So you found her, eh? Can you
imagine that?"
He reached out and took West by the arm.
"Maybe we'll have a lot to talk about," he said. "We'll have to compare
our notes."
Together they moved up the hillside, the man's gloved hand clutching
West by the arm.
"You're Langdon," West hazarded, as casually as he could speak.